Humanist minuscule

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versals
and decorations.
The evolution of minuscule Latin script

Humanist minuscule is a

Renaissance humanists, obsessed with the revival of antiquity and their role as its inheritors, took to be ancient Roman:

[W]hen they handled manuscript books copied by eleventh- and twelfth-century scribes, Quattrocento literati thought they were looking at texts that came right out of the bookshops of ancient Rome".[3]

The humanistic term litterae antiquae (the "ancient letters") applied to this hand was an inheritance from the fourteenth century, where the phrase had been opposed to litterae modernae ("modern letters"), or Blackletter.[4]

The humanist minuscule was connected to the humanistic content of the texts for which it was the appropriate vehicle. By contrast, fifteenth-century texts of professional interest in the fields of law, medicine, and traditional Thomistic philosophy still being taught in the universities were circulated in blackletter, whereas vernacular literature had its own, separate, distinctive traditions. "A humanist manuscript was intended to suggest its contents by its look," Martin Davies has noted: "old wine in new bottles, or the very latest vintage in stylish new dress".[5] With the diffusion of humanist manuscripts produced in the highly organized commercial scriptoria of Quattrocento Italy, the Italian humanist script reached the rest of Europe, a very important aspect which has not yet been fully explored.[6]

Petrarchan reform

In

Boccaccio was a great admirer of Petrarch; from Boccaccio's immediate circle this post-Petrarchan "semi-gothic" revised hand spread to literati in Florence, Lombardy,[9] and the Veneto.[10]

Poggio Bracciolini

A more thorough reform of handwriting than the Petrarchan compromise was in the offing. The generator of the new style (illustration) was

Medici library was catalogued in 1418, almost half the manuscripts were noted as in the lettera antica. The new script was embraced and developed by the Florentine humanists and educators Niccolò de' Niccoli[13] and Coluccio Salutati
.

Niccoli's cursive and roman typeface

The neat, sloping, humanist

Ludovico Arrighi in the early sixteenth century.[15]

In the

roman typeface, as it was standardized by Aldus Manutius, who introduced his revolutionary italic typeface based on the chancery hand in Venice, 1501, and was practised by designer-printers Nicolas Jenson and Francesco Griffo; roman type has helped establish the remarkable resistance to change of the modern Latin alphabet.[16]

See also

References

  1. ^ D. Thomas, "What is the origin of the scrittura humanistica?", Bibliofilia 53 (1951:1–10).
  2. ^ Meiss, "Towards a more comprehensive Renaissance palaeography", The Art Bulletin 42 (1960:1).
  3. Cyrillic scripts, was thought to have been scribed by Saint Jerome himself, and in the late sixteenth century incorporated into the coronation ceremony of French kings, who took the oath of the Order of the Holy Spirit
    by touching the book.
  4. ^ Martin Davies, "Humanism in script and print", in Jill Kraye, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, 1996:note 3 p. 60.
  5. ^ Davies in Kraye (ed.) 1996:51.
  6. ^ P.O. Kristeller, "The European Diffusion of Italian Humanism", Italica 39, 1962.
  7. ^ Petrarch, La scrittura, discussed by Armando Petrucci, La scrittura di Francesco Petrarca (Vatican City) 1967.
  8. ^ Petrarch, La scrittura, noted in Albert Derolez, "The script reform of Petrarch: an illusion?" in John Haines, Randall Rosenfeld, eds. Music and Medieval Manuscripts: paleography and performance 2006:5f; Derolez discusses the degree of Petrarch's often alluded-to reform.
  9. ^ Mirella Ferrari "La 'littera antiqua' a Milan, 1417–1439" in Johanne Autenrieth, ed. Renaissance- und Humanistenhandschriften, (Munich: Oldenbourg,) 1988:21–29.
  10. ^ Rhiannon Daniels, Boccaccio and the book: production and reading in Italy 1340–1520, 2009:28.
  11. ^ Davies, in Kraye (ed.) 1996:51.
  12. ^ Ullman, The Origin and Development of Humanistic Script (Rome) 1960.
  13. ^ Stanley Morison, "Early humanistic script and the first roman type", reprinted in his Selected Essays on the History of Letter-Forms in Manuscript and Print, ed. by David McKitterick, 2 vols. 1981:206-29.
  14. ^ Daniels 2009:29.
  15. ^ "Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library & Renaissance Culture"
  16. ^ S. Morison, "Early humanistic script and the first roman type", The Library 24 (1943:1–291; Lane Wilkinson (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga), "The Humanistic minuscule and the advent of Roman type" (online text in pdf format, archived from the original at the Wayback Machine 2011-03-13).

External links

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